How NOT to write a law school essay – Part I

I am working on my personal statement for law school and I have a feeling that I am going to go through many, strikingly dissimilar drafts before it is all said and done.  If they are entertaining enough, I will post excerpts here.

The following is the beginning excerpt from a draft I wrote last night.  Unfortunately, it better serves as the beginning of a short story, rather than a personal statement, and I am not sure (and neither are my editors) that my experiences as a five year old (which are probably exaggerated by me) make a convincing argument for why I should be a lawyer.

Korcula is in the picture below. Enjoy.

At age four I fancied myself an effective international lawyer and shined as the general council for the Marko Polo estate in Croatia.

Most people believe that Marko Polo was born in Venice.  In fact, and any Croatian will tell you, he was born and spent his childhood on the corner of Ulica DePolo and Ulica Svetog Martina in Korcula, a small medieval tourist town in the Croatian Adriatic, once a key  trading port of the Venetian city-state empire.  UNICEF representatives would argue differently but – and not to belabor the point – they never read a Croatian history book, or, for that matter, a text book of the Former Yugoslavia.  Marko Polo’s beard, if one looks closely, is long, dark, terse, and distinctly Balkan.

At that time, before the renovation, Marko Polo’s estate was not much of a museum, and everyone in Korcula knew it.  The entirety of it consisted of a gutted out three story building, and a tower.  But, because it was Korcula’s star attraction (stardom is relative in a town of 5000 people) the Berivic’s, who owned the property, decided to charge the somewhat steep price of ten Yugoslavian Dinars per entry.  Our family had been friends with the Berivic’s family for a long time and they let my grandparents sell tickets at the door during two months in the summer.  We lived next door, so it was very convenient for my grandparents’ aging legs.  To help this family business, my job was to make sure that everybody climbed to the top of the tower, because the rule was “if they climb to the top, then we do not give their money back”.

In the seldom occasion that some tourist would complain, the grandparent on gate duty would point at the sign which stated in German, English, French, Italian, and Spanish “No money back, if you climbed to the top of the tower.”  If anybody protested, I would freeze with my finger in the air and confirm that the tourist, in fact, had been at the top because I had followed them all the way up.  If the tourists argued for a refund on the basis of scant evidence that the house was actually Marko Polo’s, I would quickly recite, in fast and high pitched Serbo-Croatian, the information from the first full paragraph of this essay, much to the bewilderment of the tourist and to amusement of my grandparents.  I never lost a case.